Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

Thunderf00t takes a creationist video producer named HowTheWorldWorks to task for the obvious subscription number manipulation — how tons of accounts subscribe to his videos within a two-week window, each with a watched-video count of 0, and HTWW mysteriously hid his subscriber list after being found out. And it is epic.

Hey creationists, why can’t you play fair? Is it because your ideas are bankrupt and fringe, and you are honestly not nearly as popular as the science Youtubers? Because I suspect that to be the case. Play fair, guys. Jesus would!

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Creationists surely do love to fight dirty on Youtube, whether it’s by using vote-bots to skew legitimate metrics of brainshare, or abusing them some DMCA. The last time I reported on this, it was VenomFangX being a fucking douchebag and filing false DMCA claims to squelch an opposing viewpoint. This time, it’s the Creationist Discovery Institute, taking aim at DonExodus2 for daring to debunk Casey Luskin’s most recent appearance on Faux News. Please note: the Creation Discovery Institute, a wholly owned subsidiary of Casey Luskin Inc., doesn’t even own any of this material, and any use falls under the Criticism clause to begin with so even if Fox News filed the claim it would still fail.

Make no mistake: THIS IS WHY WE ARE UNCIVIL. Rather than letting the marketplace of ideas have a fair shake at both sides of the argument, they put their thumb on the scales by temporarily censoring the other side. Luckily they forgot about the Streissand Effect: the internet views censorship as damage and routes around it, e.g. by reuploading the video over and over and over again, on multiple mirrors and through multiple news channels. The more you try to censor something, the more attention you call to it, quickly turning an otherwise unknown event into a full-blown internet meme. If you want something to go away quietly, you ignore it — because no matter how many hits it gets, no matter how viral it goes, squelching it will give it more brainshare. Let it run its course and deal with the damage afterward, that’s your only choice.

Here’s a re-upload of the original video that freaked out the Creation Discovery Institute assholes (dammit, I keep doing that!). I can see why they’d want to shut down any discussion on this subject — DonExodus dissects the whole segment with surgical precision.

I have to contend Youtube has some part in this, in that they need to damn well shore up their takedown process. They know people are abusing this, and by doing nothing about the abuse they are complicit.

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If there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s a cheater. No, I’m not talking about using a cheat code so you can blow through the last stage of Doom 3 to beat the end boss and see the ending sequence after a long weekend of slagging your way through demons the old fashioned way — I mean, cheating where it counts, where cheating affects another human being negatively. And where those internet-keyboard-brigade creationists are concerned, while all of their actions are objectively negative, those actions that can safely be described as “cheating” are especially deplorable. This is the story of how those same creationists are cheating at Youtube.

Superman and Hercules square off in a battle of who can be the biggest asshole straw-atheist in this blockbuster that likely resulted in no appreciable increase in text messages despite the imploring at the end to text all your friends.

We watched this on April Fool’s Day. Yes, that was intentional.

Oh yeah, and dude from Duck Dynasty is in it because… uh… JEEEEZUS[Read more…]

In the vein of the harassment policies campaign timeline, wherein the major players in the movement fought hard for harassment policies at secular events and largely won the day despite monumental pushback, I felt it prudent to get ahead of people trying to misinterpret the timeline of events and twist the timeline to their own ends. That harassment policies campaign actually contains a significant amount of back-story for a lot of these issues. It also includes a number of charges with regard to assaults that had been reported but not dealt with by the organizations in question. Take a moment to re-familiarize yourself with that timeline before returning here, please.

As a result of the community reaching a tipping point, with many prominent voices having been subjected to harassment for years on end, these past few weeks have become something of a watershed moment for our movements. It is important that the actions are documented, even where legal threats have removed the original claims. I will be updating this on the fly, as a living document, much as I did with the previous timeline. At the bottom is a list of links I’m already planning on including, that will be put into their proper positions as I go.

Please feel free to add important events in the comments, though I am not going back as far as WiS2 and documenting the controversy surrounding it unless it’s extremely relevant to this timeline. I am also not linking every single blog commentary unless it has important or unique events or pieces of context, though I am not against comments containing links to said less-directly-relevant commentary even if it doesn’t make it into the body of the post.[Read more…]

It seems cheatingatYoutube isn’t the only sport of those without a leg to stand on ideologically. A group of right-wingers organized using a Yahoo! Group to orchestrate and perpetuate a continual “burial brigade” on Digg, a social bookmarking site I admittedly never use myself, in order to “bury” posts from left-leaning sources, or even just left-leaning news. Thankfully, this cheating isn’t going unnoticed, as the mainstream media has caught on.

Digg is a popular site where users share articles, photos and video links. News outlets have often used Digg for story leads. The expose shows how right-wing individuals are making an effort to stop left-leaning stories from being shared widely. In contrast, Olson discovered that the Digg Patriots favored stories about conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Michelle Malkin.

This is part of Olson’s AlterNet article:

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present, such as BalancingAct, EMFK, Janinco, mikeinto, and spindig. 10 members have been part of Digg since 2005-2006, with 43 having their current account there for over 2 years. 19 are in the top 500 all time users as ranked by Social Blade, including 3 in the top 100. They have submitted over 30,000 articles, and dugg over 1,000,000 submits collectively. They regularly front page material, yet have some paranoid delusion that the Digg admins are part of some conspiracy to censor them, not once recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of their organized censorship doing that very thing.

ABC News wrote a story about the expose and published Kevin Rose’s tweet on the matter saying that his company is “looking into this.” The Atlantic Monthly has also written about the controversy surrounding Digg.

Digg has said they will do away with the “bury” option since it’s being so easily abused to kill articles before they even have a chance at making the front page, since that means a bare few people were controlling the flow of information on the site. This doesn’t address the overarching fact that people are willing to cheat to have their ideologies pushed. It also doesn’t address the fact that the supposed purveyors of all that is right and good have been caught once again exhibiting their dubious moral fibre.

This picture absolutely floored me today — some of the moons hardly look bigger than motes of dust on this very long, mostly black image, but the Mars Observatory got Earth and Jupiter in the same frame.

Proof that Falcon Heene’s dad is a duplicitous fucker, and a bit of a nutbar to boot. Now can we stop feeding his attention whore nature?

Allegations have emerged that General McChrystal, handpicked by Obama to end the Afghanistan war, was involved in the cover-up of the real reasons behind Pat Tillman’s super-suspicious death.

Simon Singh won an appeal in the fight against the British Chiropractic Association after he decried their practice of pimping out “bogus” neck-cracking-based remedies for colic, ear infections, asthma and other issues in children. Apparently he ran afoul of British libel laws, despite everything he said being science-based — e.g. the BCA made claims they couldn’t back up, he called them on it, they went crying to the courts. Keep fighting, Mr. Singh, we’re all pulling for you.

Scientific testing on mice suggests we may soon be able to induce a quasi-suspended-animation merely by administering certain combinations of gases to patients prior to surgery, providing surgeons much, MUCH longer to perform delicate operations. We know what gases are to be used on some smaller animals, and more research needs to be done before we can use this to help perform surgeries on larger animals like cats, dogs, monkeys and humans.

CNN scuttled an anti-Lou Dobbs ad, paid for by progressives enraged that his primary focus is constantly on those damn dirty brown people coming up from Mexico despite all the millions of issues America faces, and despite there not only being very few Mexicans actually entering the country illegally, the ones that do don’t seem to be much of a burden on your society.

Obama proclaims that he is “just getting started”, and that he won’t brook any more obstructionism from certain elements. ‘Bout time someone on the side of reason grew a bit of a backbone. Now, if you could “get started” on some of your more long-standing and pressing promises, that’d be great. You have a supermajority in the senate, why not just steamroll the obstructionists a few times? Why do you keep allowing bills to be gutted (and by gutted I mean reduced to nothing more than platitudes and pats on the head)?

Let’s see if I can squeeze one more post out of this tab collection. I’m almost through it all! If only I could stop clicking on Twitter links…

I saw this on TLC originally, on some “Trading Spouses” show (or something — it was mostly just on after Holmes on Homes), and had to change the channel when this crazy Christian lady got put into a non-Christian household. I couldn’t even make it through the first minute — as soon as she screamed “SHE’S NOT A CHRISTIANNNNAAH!!!” I turned it off.